Womens FA Cup Explained: Format, Rounds and Wembley

In 1921 the Football Association barred women's teams from playing on grounds belonging to its member clubs. The ban held for half a century. It was lifted in 1971, and in that same season the Women's Football Association ran the first national knockout competition for women's clubs in England — the tournament that Southampton won, and the tournament that, through several changes of owner and several changes of name, is still played every year as the Women's FA Cup.

That continuity matters when you are trying to make sense of the format. The competition was not designed in a boardroom to serve a professional league; it was built by volunteers for clubs that had nowhere else to play, and the shape of it — hundreds of entrants, regionalised early draws, a long qualifying programme before anyone famous appears — is inherited from that period rather than borrowed from the men's game. What follows is how the rounds fit together, when Women's Super League and Championship sides join, where the money comes from, and why the final ended up at Wembley.

Where the competition came from, and who ran it before the FA

The Women's Football Association was formed in 1969, at a point when the English women's game had no governing body of its own and no recognition from the one that mattered. Its first act of real consequence was to organise a cup. The inaugural competition ran across the 1970-71 season, and the first final produced a detail that still surprises people: Southampton's opponents were Stewarton Thistle, a Scottish club, because the early tournament was not policed by the border in the way a modern FA competition is.

Southampton then dominated. Through the 1970s and into the early 1980s the club won the trophy repeatedly, a run of success that has no equivalent in the modern era and that is largely forgotten because almost none of it was filmed. Doncaster Rovers Belles took over as the competition's defining side through the late 1980s and early 1990s, reaching final after final from a base in South Yorkshire that had none of the resources a top-tier club now takes for granted.

The FA assumed responsibility for women's football in England in 1993, and the cup came with it. That handover changed the competition's status more than its structure. It acquired the FA's name, its disciplinary machinery and its sponsorship apparatus — the tournament has run under several commercial titles since, including SSE, Vitality and Adobe branding — and, eventually, its access to Wembley.

What the handover did not change was the entry principle. The competition remained open to any affiliated women's club prepared to fill in the form and travel, which is why a tournament that ends under the Wembley arch begins on parks pitches in August.

The round structure, and where each tier joins

The competition is a straight single-elimination knockout. There are no groups, no seeding beyond the regionalisation of the early draws, and no second chances.

Entry is staggered by tier. Clubs from the lower reaches of the pyramid begin in the preliminary and qualifying rounds; the rounds proper start once qualifying has produced its survivors; and the two strongest tiers come in near the end.

Stage	Who is playing	What it looks like
Preliminary and qualifying rounds	Clubs from the regional leagues and below	Regionalised draws, club pitches, small crowds
First and second rounds proper	Qualifiers plus third-tier and fourth-tier clubs	Still regionalised, occasional cross-tier ties
Third round proper	Second-tier clubs enter	The first genuine step up in quality
Fourth round proper	Women's Super League clubs enter	The round the broadcasters start caring about
Fifth round and quarter-finals	Mostly top-two-tier clubs	The draw opens up nationally
Semi-finals	Four clubs	Played at club grounds, not a neutral venue
Final	Two clubs	Wembley Stadium

1. 1EnterAn affiliated club at the required level submits an entry before the season's deadline.
2. 2QualifyingRegionalised knockout ties among lower-tier clubs, decided on the day where the rules require it.
3. 3Rounds proper beginQualifiers meet third and fourth-tier clubs, with draws still kept broadly regional.
4. 4Second tier entersChampionship clubs join at the third round proper, and the gap in resources starts to show.
5. 5Top tier entersWSL clubs come in at the fourth round proper against whoever has survived.
6. 6Last eightThe draw opens nationally and travel stops being a consideration in the pairings.
7. 7Semi-finalsStaged at club grounds, which keeps the tie local to one set of supporters.
8. 8FinalWembley Stadium, on a fixed date in the FA's calendar.

The sequence of stages in the competition, not a fixture list or a count of matches for any particular season.

The FA sets these entry points in the competition rules and has adjusted them when the pyramid beneath has been restructured — and the women's pyramid has been restructured more than once in the past fifteen years. The principle holds even when the round numbers move: the higher your tier, the later you start, and the fewer matches you need to win.

One more structural point separates this competition from its men's counterpart. The modern Women's FA Cup has moved away from replays, with ties settled on the day by extra time and, where necessary, penalties. That decision was driven by fixture congestion and by the cost of a second match to a club without a full-time squad. It has a side effect worth naming: a lower-tier club that holds a professional side for ninety minutes does not get a lucrative second game out of it, which removes one of the traditional financial rewards of a cup run.

Qualifying rounds and the part nobody televises

August, a council pitch somewhere in the Midlands, two sides who have never played each other, a referee appointed by a county FA and one committee member selling raffle tickets from a folding table. That is the competition for its first two months, and it accounts for the majority of the matches played in it.

Qualifying draws are regionalised deliberately. The FA splits entrants into geographic sections so that a fourth-tier club is not asked to send a squad of amateurs 250 miles on a Sunday morning at its own expense. The sectioning is not perfect — a club at the edge of a region can still draw a long trip — but it is the single mechanism that keeps the early rounds financially survivable for clubs whose entire annual budget would not cover a week's laundry at a Premier League training ground.

Entry requirements at this level are lighter than the men's competition's ground grading, which is one reason the field is so wide. A club needs affiliation to its county FA, membership of a sanctioned league at the required step, players registered correctly, and a pitch that meets the FA's criteria for the competition. Floodlights, covered seating and turnstiles do not come into it for most qualifying ties. If you want to see how the equivalent machinery works in the men's game, the qualifying programme for the men's FA Cup runs on the same principle at a much larger scale.

The practical consequence is that the Women's FA Cup is, for most of its duration, a grassroots competition wearing a national badge. The overwhelming majority of clubs that enter will never meet a professional side.

How many clubs enter, and what that number actually means

The FA publishes an entry figure each season and it runs into the hundreds. It moves year to year, because it is a function of two things that are themselves unstable: how many women's clubs exist at the required level, and how many of those choose to commit to a competition that might cost them more in travel than it returns in prize money.

Both of those have trended upwards since the mid-2010s, and the growth is not evenly distributed. New teams have appeared fastest in areas where a men's club with resources has established or absorbed a women's side, which means the entry list has thickened around the cities and remains thin in parts of the country where the nearest sanctioned women's league is an hour's drive away.

There is a counter-pressure that gets less attention. Clubs also withdraw. A side that loses half a squad to university, work relocation or injury can find itself unable to field eleven players on a fixed cup date, and a walkover in the preliminary round is a quiet but regular feature of the competition. The FA's rules set out the consequences, which include financial penalties and, in some circumstances, removal from the following season's competition.

So the headline entry number tells you the scale of the tournament. It does not tell you the health of the base, and anyone using it as a proxy for participation is reading more into it than it carries.

A related point about eligibility. Clubs enter as clubs, not as teams, and a club running two women's sides cannot enter both and shuffle players between them. Player registration rules bite hard here: a player who has appeared for one club in the competition in a given season is cup-tied and cannot play for another, which occasionally strands a club that signs a new forward in January and discovers she played ninety minutes in a qualifying round in September. The rules are published in full and clubs still get caught by them every year, usually the ones without a secretary who reads the small print.

Prize money, and why the FA kept raising it

Prize money in this competition is paid round by round, on a rising scale, from the qualifying stages upwards. Payments reach both clubs in some of the earliest rounds; from the rounds proper onwards it is the winner who is rewarded, with the sums increasing as the field narrows and a substantial payment reserved for the club that wins the final.

The FA increased the fund sharply during the 2020s, and did so more than once. The rationale offered publicly was straightforward — the disparity between the men's and women's competitions was indefensible, and the money reached clubs that had almost no other route to a five-figure windfall. The gap has narrowed. It has not closed, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise, because the men's competition still distributes several times more.

Because the figures have moved repeatedly and are set out afresh in each season's competition rules, this page does not print them. Take them from the FA's published rules for the season you are interested in. The structure of the men's FA Cup prize fund is built the same way, round by round, and reading it will show you how the mechanism works even where the amounts differ.

What the money does is more interesting than what it is. For a WSL club, a run to the final is a rounding error against a wage bill. For a fourth-tier club, two or three round wins can pay for a season's pitch hire, a set of kit and the coach travel that would otherwise come out of players' own pockets. The same cheque means completely different things at either end of the pyramid, and that asymmetry is the strongest argument the FA has for the increases it has made.

Wembley, and the decision to put the final there

The 2015 final was the first to be played at Wembley. Chelsea beat Notts County 1-0, Ji So-yun scored the goal, and a competition that had spent forty-four years moving between club grounds acquired a permanent home with 90,000 seats in it.

The venues before that had been respectable rather than grand. Ashton Gate in Bristol, the Keepmoat in Doncaster, the City Ground in Nottingham — proper football stadiums, chosen for a capacity that matched the crowd rather than the ambition. Moving to Wembley was a bet that the crowd would grow into the building, and for the first few years the television pictures showed a great many empty red seats behind the goals.

The bet paid off, though not immediately and not without help. The FA priced tickets low, marketed the final as a family day out, and scheduled it in a slot that did not compete with the men's fixture list. Free coach travel for supporters' groups and block bookings for grassroots clubs did much of the early work.

There has been one interruption. The 2019-20 final was delayed by the pandemic and eventually played at Wembley behind closed doors, which produced the strange spectacle of a national showpiece in an empty national stadium. The following season's final was also pushed back in the calendar. Both were still played at Wembley, and the FA's commitment to the venue survived the disruption intact.

If you are planning to go, the practicalities are those of any Wembley fixture — the walk up Olympic Way from Wembley Park, the stewarding at the top of the steps, the queue for the Jubilee line afterwards. Our guide to visiting Wembley Stadium covers the access routes and the things worth knowing before you travel.

The crowd, and how the attendance record moved

Attendance at the final is the clearest measure of the competition's change in status, because it is the one number that has been recorded consistently across the whole period.

The pattern goes roughly like this. Through the pre-Wembley years crowds were counted in the thousands, occasionally in the low tens of thousands for a well-placed final. The first Wembley finals pushed past 30,000. Growth was steady rather than explosive until England's hosting and winning of the European Championship in 2022, after which the ceiling moved decisively: the 2023 final drew a crowd of more than 77,000, the largest the competition has recorded.

• 1971First competition
• 1993FA took control
• 2015First Wembley final

Founding and relocation dates only. These are not attendance or participation figures.

Two things drove that. The Euros created a wave of new supporters who had watched a tournament on free-to-air television and wanted a live fixture to attach themselves to, and the final was the most accessible one on the calendar. Pricing policy did the rest — the FA has consistently kept final tickets far cheaper than the men's equivalent, and a family of four can attend for roughly what two adults would pay for a mid-table Premier League league game.

Whether crowds at that level are sustainable is a fair question, and one nobody can answer from the data available. A single record is a record, not a trend.

Giant killings, and the conditions that produce them

Upsets in this competition are structurally more likely than in the men's equivalent, and the reasons deserve setting out properly rather than treating each one as a miracle.

Start with the tier gaps. The English women's pyramid professionalised from the top down and very recently, which means the distance between a full-time WSL squad and a part-time third-tier side is enormous in fitness and preparation but far smaller in raw ability than the equivalent gap in the men's game. A tier-three side may contain players who were in a professional set-up eighteen months earlier.

Then the match conditions. Lower-tier clubs play on pitches that a professional side never sees — heavy surfaces in January, artificial 3G at some grounds, tight dimensions, no dugout worth the name. Ties are drawn at the lower-ranked club's ground where the rules allow it, and that is a real, repeatable advantage.

Squad depth is the third factor and probably the most decisive. A professional club with European commitments and a league title to defend will rotate for a cup tie against lower-tier opposition. Rotation in a squad of twenty is a gamble. Rotation in a squad of thirty-five with an academy behind it is a different proposition, and the clubs that get caught are usually the ones rotating hardest with the least to fall back on.

The absence of replays cuts both ways here. It denies the underdog a second payday. It also denies the favourite a second chance, and a single bad ninety minutes on a cold pitch in front of 400 people has ended more than one cup campaign that looked untroubled on paper.

What a cup run is actually worth to a lower-tier club

Money first, though not only money. Prize payments accumulate through the rounds, and a club that wins three ties can bank a sum that materially changes its budget for the year.

Gate receipts are the second stream, and they behave unpredictably. A home tie against a WSL side will draw a crowd many times the club's league average, but a club with a 300-capacity ground cannot sell 3,000 tickets. Several have solved this by moving the tie to a nearby men's club's stadium, trading atmosphere and home advantage for a larger gate. That is a genuine decision with a real cost, and clubs have gone both ways on it.

The third stream is the least measurable and possibly the most valuable. A cup run puts a club's name in the local paper, on regional television and in front of sponsors who had never heard of it. Volunteers appear. Junior sections fill up. A club that reaches the third round proper in November is recruiting from a different position by March.

Set against that is the cost. Extra training sessions, physiotherapy for a squad that trains twice a week, travel to a fixture 200 miles away, stewarding and safety requirements that scale with the crowd. A run is not free, and the clubs that have been through one talk about the administrative load as much as they talk about the football.

1. 1Check the drawConfirm which club is at home under the competition rules and whether the tie can be reversed by agreement.
2. 2Assess the groundCompare the safety certificate capacity against realistic demand for the fixture.
3. 3Decide on a switchWeigh a larger gate at a borrowed stadium against home advantage and the pitch the players know.
4. 4Arrange stewardingMatch the safety requirements to the expected crowd, which usually means paying for staff the club never normally needs.
5. 5Sell ticketsSet a price that funds the season without pricing out the regulars who come every other week.
6. 6Handle the mediaField requests from regional and national outlets with a volunteer committee and no press officer.
7. 7Play the tieNinety minutes, extra time if needed, then penalties. No replay to fall back on.

The sequence of practical decisions a club faces, drawn from how the competition's rules and safety requirements work. No figures are implied.

Broadcast coverage and getting to see the early rounds

The final has been shown live on free-to-air television in Britain, with the BBC the long-standing partner for the showpiece, and later rounds have appeared across a mix of broadcast and streaming platforms. The FA has also streamed matches through its own service, which at various points has carried ties no broadcaster wanted.

Coverage below the fifth round is patchy, and the honest guidance is that it will stay patchy. There is no economic case for sending an outside-broadcast unit to a preliminary-round tie between two regional-league sides, and the clubs themselves rarely have the equipment to stream competently. What exists instead is a scattered ecosystem of club-run video feeds, county FA social accounts and the occasional local radio commentary.

For the early rounds, the reliable sources are the FA's own competition pages, which publish the draw and the results in full, and the websites of the leagues the clubs play in. County FA sites carry fixtures for teams in their area. Following the Women's Super League will tell you nothing about who is playing in the second qualifying round; the pyramid below it is where that information lives.

If you want to watch a tie in person before Christmas, admission at qualifying level is typically a few pounds, sometimes nothing at all, and nobody will mind if you stand behind the goal with a flask.

How the structure compares with the men's competition

The two competitions share a name, a governing body and a knockout principle. Almost everything else differs, and the differences are informative rather than incidental.

Feature	Women's FA Cup	Men's FA Cup
Entrants	Hundreds	Well over 700
Top-tier entry	Fourth round proper	Third round proper
Replays	Ties settled on the day	Long-standing tradition, since curtailed
Semi-final venue	Club grounds	Wembley Stadium
Final venue	Wembley Stadium	Wembley Stadium
Prize fund scale	Increased repeatedly in the 2020s	Several times larger

The semi-final difference is the one supporters notice most. The men's competition moved its semi-finals to Wembley in 2008, a decision driven by stadium finances that has been unpopular ever since because it strips the final of its uniqueness. The women's competition has kept its semi-finals at club grounds, which means a supporter of a club in the last four gets a home tie or a short away trip rather than a second expensive day in north-west London. It is the better arrangement, and it survives mainly because the crowds have not yet forced the question.

Entry points are the other structural gap. Top-tier men's clubs enter at the third round proper, and the men's competition therefore has one more romantic round in it before the professional sides arrive. Both competitions are fed by the pyramid beneath them, though the men's version has a far deeper qualifying programme, running from an extra preliminary round in August through six qualifying rounds before the first round proper.

There is a difference of atmosphere too, and it is not trivial. The men's competition carries a century and a half of accumulated ritual — the third round draw as a national event, the shock result as a genre of its own, the abandoned replay tradition still mourned every January. The women's competition has had thirty years under the FA and rather less accumulated myth, which cuts both ways. It has fewer sacred cows and has therefore been able to change its format, its venue and its prize structure without the row that would greet the same changes on the men's side.

Records, and the clubs that keep appearing

Arsenal are the most successful club in the competition's history by a distance, and have been for most of the modern era. Southampton's haul from the 1970s and early 1980s remains the largest concentration of wins by any club in a short period, and it is the record most likely to be misread, because it belongs to a version of the competition with a much smaller field.

Doncaster Rovers Belles sit between those two. Through the late 1980s and early 1990s the Belles reached the final repeatedly and won it several times, from a club structure that was recognisably grassroots. No club in the modern competition wins it from that position, and none is likely to again.

Individual records are harder to state with confidence. Appearance and goalscoring records were not maintained to a consistent standard through the WFA years, and figures quoted for players from that era should be treated with some caution. The FA's own record-keeping improves markedly after 1993. Anyone publishing a definitive list of leading scorers across the whole history of the tournament is making a claim the source material does not fully support, and it is better to say so than to print a tidy table that quietly papers over the gap.

Clubs promoted into the top tier have a habit of reaching a quarter-final within a couple of seasons, which is a reasonable illustration of how compressed the competitive range still is. The mechanics of moving up are covered in the guide to promotion from the Women's Championship.

Following it properly, from August onwards

The competition rewards early attention more than most. By the time the WSL clubs arrive in the fourth round proper the field has already been narrowed by three months of football that almost nobody watched, and the club drawn away to a professional side has usually won four ties to get there.

Practical advice, in the order you would need it. The draw for each round is published by the FA, with dates fixed well in advance in the football calendar. Fixtures at qualifying level are typically Sunday afternoons, occasionally Saturday. Kick-off times shift for pitch availability more often than in the men's game, and a tie can move at short notice, so check with the club rather than relying on a listing.

Grounds at this level are unglamorous and welcoming in roughly equal measure. Parking is usually free and usually on a verge. There will be a tea hut. The referee will be a county-registered official working through the promotion levels, quite possibly on one of their first appointments in a national competition, and the standard of officiating varies accordingly.

A word on team news, because it catches people out. Squad lists at this level are not published in advance in any reliable form, and a club at tier four may be missing three regulars because of shift patterns rather than injury. Turning up expecting the side that won last week is a mistake. The compensation is that you can stand ten feet from the touchline and hear every instruction, which is a better way to learn what a coach actually wants from a back four than any televised match will ever provide.

For the wider picture of the English game and where this competition sits in it, the England sports hub collects the rest of these guides, and our football section carries the news coverage.

One last thing worth saying plainly. The Women's FA Cup is the oldest continuously contested national competition in English women's football, older than the WSL by nearly forty years and older than the FA's own involvement in the women's game by twenty-two. Every argument about the future of the sport in this country is happening inside a tournament that predates all of them.